Top Soros operative who scored Biden White House visits to depart role soon
Gabe Kaminsky
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A senior employee at the George Soros-backed Open Society Foundations who has repeatedly visited the White House and helped shape the Biden administration’s agenda is set to depart from his role with the left-wing grantmaking network.
Tom Perriello, who is listed in White House visitor logs 17 times between May 2021 and December 2022, will leave his role in mid-July as executive director of Open Society-U.S., Politico reported. He worked there for five years and is also on the board of Governing for Impact, a secretive dark money group funded by Soros that has touted its success rolling back Trump administration policies on housing, healthcare, education, and climate, according to internal memos.
TOP SOROS OPERATIVE TOM PERRIELLO REPEATEDLY VISITED JOE BIDEN WHITE HOUSE
“This wasn’t rocket science,” Perriello said. “The center of gravity in American politics has shifted towards needing fundamental transformation of the system more than fixing around the edges.”
OSF and Perriello played a role in advocating climate initiatives outlined in President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, a $740 billion energy and climate spending bill signed into law in August 2022. Alex Soros, the son of George Soros and OSF’s chairman of the board of directors, said that it decided to “double” its investments to advance policy proposals and that Perriello helped “transform the way we worked.”
“We believe that this has allowed us to make major contributions to protecting the democratic process, building support for far-reaching reforms on climate and equity, and expanding fundamental rights for underserved communities,” Alex Soros said.
Laleh Ispahani, co-director of Open Society-U.S., will take over Perriello’s role. Ispahani was previously senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, in which she worked on “racial justice and human rights,” according to the Council on Foundations, a nonprofit group membership association.
Perriello, a former congressman from Virginia and ex-diplomat in the Obama administration, has visited with the likes of Kimberly Lang, executive assistant for the Transportation Security Administration and a former assistant to the National Security Council, U.S. Ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Yohannes Abraham, and White House policy adviser Richard Figueroa, according to White House visitor logs.
He was also in attendance at the White House on April 8, 2022, the day Biden spoke to commemorate the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, according to visitor logs.
Meanwhile, Governing for Impact, which was created as a project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund, an advocacy group managed by the top Democratic-linked dark money network Arabella Advisors, has worked behind the scenes to bolster Biden’s agenda. The group has sought to recruit talent through Harvard Law School’s website, and its executive director is Rachael Klarman, a graduate of the institution and former policy analyst for the liberal advocacy group Democracy Forward, which is chaired by Democratic superlawyer Marc Elias.
Governing for Impact pocketed over $17.4 million in grants between 2019 and 2021 from Open Society-U.S. and Soros’s Foundation to Promote Open Society, another group in the Soros-funded network, records show. It has also developed a partnership in the past with the Economic Policy Institute, a pro-union organization co-founded in 1986 by former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich.
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The institute received over $1.2 million from the Foundation to Promote Open Society between 2017 and 2019, according to grant records.
A spokeswoman for the Open Society Foundations did not return a request for comment.